DHS Fusion Center Network: An Unwieldy, Bloated, and Unaccountable Waste of Taxpayer Dollars

A new Senate report on the Department of Homeland Security’s fusion center network exposes the federal behemoth for what it really is: an unwieldy, bloated, and unaccountable waste of taxpayer dollars that has encouraged the militarization of domestic law enforcement for nearly a decade.

Thanks to former President George W. Bush and a Republican-controlled Congress, programs such as these “have become pools of ineptitude, waste and civil liberties intrusions,” according to the report. When questionable tactics used in the legitimate pursuit of terrorism become a tool in “regular” criminal investigations, the rights of all American citizens are seriously jeopardized. What do you think?

From The Center for Public Integrity

Cash spent to watch televisions and report on suspicious bass fishing in Mexico

By R. Jeffrey Smith

An alarming report published by the Department of Homeland Security in March 2010 called attention to the theft of dozens of pounds of dangerous explosives from an airport storage bunker in Washington state.

Like many such warnings, it drew on information gathered by one of the department’s “fusion centers” created to exchange data among state, local and federal officials, all at a cost to the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars.

There was just one problem with that report, and many others like it: the theft had occurred seven months earlier, and it had been highlighted within five days in a press release by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was seeking citizen assistance in tracking down the culprits.

The DHS report’s tardiness and its duplication of work by others has been a commonplace failing of work performed by fusion centers nationwide, according to a new investigation of the DHS-funded centers by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The centers were created with great fanfare over the past decade by Washington with the aim of redressing gaps in intelligence-sharing among local, state and federal officials — gaps documented by probes of the period before the Sept. 2001 attacks, when some of the attackers were stopped by police for traffic violations or other reasons, and then released.

In July 2009, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano called the fusion centers “a critical part of our nation’s homeland security capabilities.”  About 70 of the centers now exist, located in major cities and nearly all states.

But in its blistering, bipartisan staff report released late Tuesday evening,  the panel asserts that the centers – which were financed by federal taxpayers with the express aim of helping the counter-terror effort – frequently produced “shoddy, rarely timely” reports that in some cases violated civil liberties or privacy and often had little to do with terrorism.

“Most [relevant reports] were published months after they were received” from fusion centers in Washington, the subcommittee’s 107-page account said. And only a fraction of all the reports dealt with terrorism, because no one in Washington forced the centers to stay focused on that topic. The fusion center in southern Nevada – formally called a Counterterrorism Center — mostly tracks school violence, according to the report.

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